


Luminosity

by thisissarcasm



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-12
Updated: 2012-01-12
Packaged: 2017-10-29 07:24:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/317267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisissarcasm/pseuds/thisissarcasm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock Holmes deleted the solar system a long time ago. It turns out he replaced the science behind the universe with something a bit more...colorful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Luminosity

**Author's Note:**

> A very special thank you to my best friend in the entire world, Alicia, for quite literally helping me re-name the stars; and a thank you to dearest Jaymee for helping me to look at my first draft conundrum in a different light.

“When I heard the learn’d astronomer,  
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,  
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,  
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,  
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,  
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,  
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,  
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” –Walt Whitman

In the commotion that followed the flight and eventual arrest of the murderous gardener with an affinity for toxins and a vendetta against his employer, it was reasonable that Sherlock Holmes – never a man for sentiment – would allow himself to be lost among the hustle and bustle of uniformed officers coming and going, to disappear into the eager crowd of hysterical family members, curious onlookers, nosy journalists, and whoever else happened upon the scene. It was the widow, John guessed, that had done him in, when she lunged at him with running mascara and shrieking words of gratitude.

The parlor of the estate, a more than modest family homestead nestled in Hastings, was crowded with officers taking statements, forensics specialists bagging and tagging items to be presented later at trial, and bombarded largely on its outside by newspaper reporters eager to catalog the latest exploits of the great Sherlock Holmes.

John Watson, tucked away into the most nondescript corner of the room possible in such a showy home, looked for his exit. The front door was impossible, as the press was practically begging for a story. It had come to the point that even the sight of Sherlock Holmes’s dutiful blogger could send eager gossipers into a frenzy and so, John decided, it wasn’t an option. He considered the back doors nearby that led out onto the veranda, which was filled with still more policemen rolling out tape and setting up perimeters.

The kitchen of the family manor granted more silence and solitude than John had expected, and he was grateful for a moment’s peace. He leaned momentarily against the kitchen isle and let exhaustion creep into the corners of his consciousness for the first time, and he massaged his aching temples with his fingertips. He needed some air.

It was chilly out, but far from the cold of the previous London winters. It wasn’t often that cases drew them out of the crowds of the city and into the countryside. Here, everything seemed greener, smelled fresher, and somehow shone more brightly when the rainclouds eventually rolled back. On a clear night, the stars were visible for miles beyond what London could have dreamt of, and when silence descended over the countryside late into the night, the stillness was more soothing than a man who thrived on chaos might expect.

John zipped up his jacket and jammed his hands into pockets, sighing with relief when he realized that the back yard and the hills beyond it had gone seemingly ignored by the throngs of people now embroiled in the biggest scandal that Hastings had seen in years. He had already considered his blog entry about the case – sometimes, they practically wrote themselves.

What didn’t write themselves were the bits in between, the bits that didn’t find their way onto the blog. The moments when Sherlock Holmes, one of the greatest minds he had ever known, would prance into the flat splattered with pig’s blood and wielding a harpoon. The moments when Sherlock would shoot the walls, abuse the furniture, shout at the top of his lungs in frustration over things John didn’t entirely understand, and wasn’t sure he wanted to. The days he tore apart the flat in search of cigarettes were, on John’s scale, relatively calm compared to his worst-case scenarios, of which there were plenty.

Now was one of the quieter bits in between, the calm that swept over if only for a few moments before the storm began swirling again. Moments when, as far as John could understand it, Sherlock felt relatively at peace and as close to content as he might come, before his mind began circling its next target and seeking out something new and exciting.

The quiet moments were not what the world, obsessed with death and blood and violence, cared about. The world had cared for him when he was a soldier, and it had just as quickly not cared for him when he wasn’t anymore. He wondered if the world would hold his blog’s subject in such high regard if he included everything and left nothing to mystery, and he had decided somewhere along the way never to find out.

There were gardens just beyond the door that led out into the back yard, and John could make out Sherlock’s unmistakable silhouette standing near well-manicured hedges that had no doubt been kept impeccably clean by a now handcuffed gardener. Sherlock stood so still that a glance from the untrained eye might have mistaken him for an unusual statue.

Suspecting that Sherlock had snuck out for a cigarette break, John decided to inspect more closely. To his surprise, when he joined Sherlock at the garden’s entrance, he realized that Sherlock was staring upward at the night sky overhead. His eyes, usually fixed at some point in his immediate surroundings, did not waver at all, nor did he so much as blink when John approached.

In the city, clouds, bright lights, and rolling fog often dulled the stars. It was what they were both accustomed to by now, that muddled blackness overhead and too few pauses to admire the skies above. It was rare to see Sherlock in such a moment of serenity, and it caught John off guard.

“Are you alright?”

“Perfectly fine,” came Sherlock’s reply after several seconds of silence. Sherlock exhaled deeply but did not break his gaze away from the sky.

“And what are you doing, exactly?” John asked, eyeing him with surprise.

“Looking,” Sherlock said simply, as though it were somehow a stupid question to ask.

“Yes, I can see that,” John nodded, “but at what?”

“The Big Pineapple.”

John had received many strange answers to harmless questions in his time as Sherlock’s flat mate. Demands to know about body parts kept in the fridge were met with detailed descriptions of experiments. Questions about parts of deductions garnered snippy, vague soliloquies about whatever topic was at hand. There were times when Sherlock, intent on something beneath a microscope, simply could not be bothered with actual words, and would instead offer a grunt of affirmation at something John had said or asked. And yet now, standing among hedges kept meticulously by a man who poisoned the head of his employer’s household with oleander leaves, Sherlock Holmes had given John what was possibly the most nonsensical of answers to date.

“I’m sorry, did you just say-…”

“The Big Pineapple,” Sherlock repeated, blinking once. He pointed skyward, indicating to John a cluster of stars that twinkled back at them from distances beyond anything mankind would ever hope to reach.

“I took Astronomy at university, Sherlock, and I don’t think there’s a constellation called ‘The Big Pineapple.’” And yet, despite his protests, John found his eyes following Sherlock’s outstretched hand and he glanced upward, examining the little cluster of stars, tilting his head ever so slightly.

“Hm. So what do you call that one, then?” Sherlock asked. He glanced at John for the first time.

“It’s been quite a few years, but that’s Pollux, if I’m not mistaken,” John said. “Unless I was absent on the day they renamed it.”

To his surprise, Sherlock sat down on the grass and leaned back on his hands, giving him a better and more comfortable view. “I deleted the solar system, John. Does it surprise you that I deleted the names of everything beyond it, too?”

“No, what surprises me is that you’ve apparently invented some of your own,” John told him, biting back a smile.

“I always thought the original names were dull. Unimaginative. And so, from time to time, I make up my own. Some of them I remember, and some, I don’t. But that one there, it’s always The Big Pineapple,” Sherlock told him.

“You make up your own constellations.”

“Problem?” Sherlock asked, eyes still cast skyward. “Where’s the fun in resigning yourself to seeing what others see and calling them by names that don’t fit them? Why should the sky be so predictable, so boring?”

John huffed out a laugh and, to his own surprise, sat down alongside Sherlock on the grass. It was spring, and so the ground was dry and a bit chilly, but not unbearable. Crickets had begun to echo in the distance, and within a few weeks, April would fill the countryside with rain. For now, though, a quiet, cool night with a brilliantly illuminated sky. A peaceful end to an interesting and dramatic case.

“Alright, then. What else is there?” John asked at last.

Sherlock shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to offend such a learned astronomer.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’d prefer your version. Out with it,” John told him.

“If this goes on your blog-…”

“Not a word,” John said, and he meant it. There had been a time – what felt like ages ago – that he would have made special note of Sherlock’s invention of his own constellations in lieu of the actual scientific ones. And yet after everything – after dozens of cases, chases down darkened alleyways in the middle of the night, attempts against both of their lives – it hardly seemed to matter, and it was something that the general public didn’t need to know.

Sherlock considered, and then shrugged. “See that one there? That’s the Great Shopping Cart.”

John leaned so that he could follow Sherlock’s hand again, watching him draw out the shapes of the stars he had grouped into images somewhere in the vast space of his own brain. He was torn between laughter and amazement when his own brain reassembled the constellation in question into the very shape Sherlock was describing, and Ursa Major thus became the Great Shopping Cart right before his eyes.

“And over here, we have the Loch Ness Monster.” Sherlock motioned to another cluster of stars further downward in the sky.

John couldn’t hold back laughter at hearing Sherlock utter such a phrase in any context. John searched the sky for a moment, and then pointed. “Alright, then, what about…that one? Hercules. Surely you can see that one.”

“Decapitated Cadaver,” Sherlock said, waving a dismissive hand. “Hardly worth my time.”

“There, then. Lupus. It never looked like much of anything to me in the first place,” John admitted.

Sherlock gave him a questioning glance, and then followed the direction John was pointing. He had that same look of determination on his face that he normally did when working on a case, only now, his attention was devoted to something other than crime.

The consulting detective wrinkled his nose in consideration, and then broke into a smile that signaled that a decision had been made. “The Bow Tie.”

“The Bow Tie,” John repeated. “I like it. Very fashionable.”

“Fashionable? Hardly,” Sherlock said, and John could have sworn he chuckled at the notion of a fashionable bow tie. He did not take his eyes off of the sky overhead. “You understand my method, yes?”

John nodded, studying the sky carefully, rearranging stars into new possibilities in an effort to keep up with Sherlock. His eyes wandered from the Bow Tie to its nearest neighbor, formerly Centaurus, and lingered on it for a moment. A single glance sideways took him by surprise as he found Sherlock watching him rather than the sky, as though somehow attempting to figure out how John’s mind worked.

At last, John came to a conclusion about The Bow Tie’s neighbor. “The Narwhal.”

“…the Narwhal.” Sherlock was staring at him with an expression John could not read, and after a moment he let his eyes wander back to the sky. “The Narwhal it is, then.”

“The Narwhal, The Bow Tie, Nessie, the Great Shopping Cart, the Big Pineapple, and the Decapitated Cadaver,” John said, running through the list of constellations they had located in the night sky. “You should write a letter with some new name suggestions.”

“That seems more like a job for my blogger,” Sherlock told him.

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to put this on the blog.”

“I never said you had to attribute them to me,” Sherlock pointed out.

“So I’m the one who has to put my name to suggesting we change the name of the Hercules constellation to ‘Decapitated Cadaver.’ Of course,” John said, and they both laughed at the idea. “You know I have to ask what makes you bother with this at all. You’re not exactly a fan of astronomy as a science.”

Sherlock stared up at the sky, and a smile hung on his lips still. “When I was young, I wanted to be a pirate. I decided for a long while that nothing was quite so appealing as the idea of attacking merchant ships and pillaging them. I was going to be the greatest, most feared captain in history.”

John decided against mentioning that Mycroft had brought up such a point a while back, and settled instead for listening to Sherlock’s version, which he found that he vastly preferred because somehow, it meant more coming from the man himself. As though Sherlock admitting something so trivial of his own accord made it valuable somehow.

“Sailors would use the stars to guide their way,” Sherlock explained. “I assumed a successful pirate would need to know such things. Of course eventually, I realized that piracy was no longer a viable lifestyle, and moved on to more useful things.”

“Like inventing an entire career to suit you,” John pointed out with a chuckle. “Still, I think it’s a shame.”

Sherlock’s brow furrowed. “What is?”

John bit back a smile. “I think you would have made an excellent pirate.”

“I may not understand the solar system, John, but there is something to be said for the concept of stars,” Sherlock said, leaning back on his elbows and staring up at the sky above them. “In a seemingly infinite universe, science theorizes that all stars are made up of exactly the same elements. There’s something to be said for that kind of constancy.”

“Hydrogen and helium, if I’m remembering correctly.” John raised an eyebrow.

“Very good. And yet despite that constancy, pieces of everything we’ve just named – each star in our Bow Tie, in poor Decapitated Cadaver – could already be gone and we wouldn’t know it,” Sherlock said, and there was a hint of something new and different in his voice. “Millions and millions of light years away…all we’re doing is giving names to the dead.”

“But some are billions of years old, right? That’s got to count for something,” John offered, secretly alarmed at Sherlock’s rather solemn interpretation of the universe.

“And the more brightly they burn, the more quickly they die,” Sherlock said, “while others linger on for longer than any one of us can imagine. Which do you suppose would be worth more? A short burst of life, or a long, slow burn?”

John glanced away from the sky and back to Sherlock, who was still staring up at the sky intently. He studied the world’s only consulting detective in silence and wondered whether the question was rhetorical. Sherlock seemed in no real hurry for an answer, and for that, John was grateful, because he had none. It was difficult to comprehend anything beyond the span of a human life at all.

“Ten percent of human mass is comprised of hydrogen,” Sherlock continued when John did not come up with any kind of clever answer to his earlier query. “Ten percent of me, or you, or the man we just put in jail – we’re made up of the same thing as the stars, and yet we’re so very limited by comparison.”

“I don’t know that ‘limited’ is the word I’d use,” John said. “We’re fragile, yeah, but we do alright, as far as species go.”

Sherlock took this information in, and sighed. “Fragile. A kind word for it if ever there was one.”

And with that, he was back on his feet, climbing up from the grass. He gave the sky one last look, and John could not help but smile as he realized that Sherlock was at least temporarily mapping out the new names and additions to his repertoire.

“Why bother to name things if you’re just going to delete them again later?” John asked.

Sherlock surprised John by offering a hand to help him up from the ground, and when John was successfully on his feet again, Sherlock let his hand linger on John’s arm for a moment.

“Perhaps I’ll keep them, just this once.” Their eyes met, and there was something almost sad in Sherlock’s expression, something distant and distracted that John could not quite decipher.

Their cab was waiting out in front of the family mansion, and by now the crowd of people had thankfully died down. Only a few lingering police officials remained on hand to finish taking statements and collecting evidence, and John was relieved that the media circus had subsided and that they might arrive back at Baker Street in relative peace. He climbed into the back of the taxi and leaned back in the seat, realizing for the first time how tired he was and how nice it would be to see Baker Street again.

Sherlock moved to climb into the cab after him, but he halted just as suddenly. John watched in silence as Sherlock took one last look up at the stars, as though somehow bidding them a final farewell before returning to the foggy and muted night skies of London.


End file.
